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X-Arcade Solo Review

Testing

I could do a lot of things for testing. To be fair I should put the X-Arcade Solo against some decent competition so I dug out my gamepad and also used my keyboard in a few games that I have. I decided to grab Mortal Kombat 1, Street Fighter II, Space Invaders, and Metal Slug 5 to see how well they play with the hardware I'm testing. Of course these games I have aren't on the same platforms nor are they on the PC as my copy of Mortal Kombat is for the Sega Genesis and Street Fighter II is on the SNES so I figured it best to test all these games under the same emulator and since they are all available as Arcade titles, Mame was an obvious choice. The X-Arcade makes it easy when working with Mame as its default layout works with just about every game. I did encounter one such game where configuration did need altering, that being Smash TV since the original Arcade unit utilizes two joysticks and the X-Arcade solo only includes one. As for testing categories between the devices I figured comfort and playability would be most important among all the devices in these games. I will test these factors on a scale of one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the absolute best. I myself haven't played on realistic arcade hardware in a while so it did take some getting used to to adjust to playing on the device. After a bit though I became accustomed to the device.

Although it took some getting used to the X-Arcade solo quickly became my device of choice beating out a keyboard and gamepad any day when it came to the arcade titles I chose. In both Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat it became easy to do those hard to hit combos. I had a much harder time getting any Fatalities to work with my gamepad and didn't even try on the keyboard which probably would have been a flop every time. However with the X-Arcade I was hitting those button combos with ease. When Xgaming makes it a point to say you get an authentic arcade look and feel they aren't kidding. Nor are they when they say you'll play better at fighters because believe me it makes it that much easier. It would have been great to test it on other platforms but Xgaming only includes one adapter of choice when placing the order so it only came with the PS/2 USB adapter. I'm sure this would also be great for Xbox Live Arcade. In case you are wondering, the adapters depending on console are anywhere between $7.95 to $19.95.